The Invention Of A Rarity: Tibet's Gaden Tangka F3

The combination of a mistake by Krause Y number, with the authority of NGC and PCGS slabs, an index from the 1980's using Roman Numerals, a distinctive coin edge and a German discovery in the 1990's has created a rarity out of one the most common coins of the Tibetan Gaden Tangka range - the KMY. F13.3

The 1980's saw the first (and to date most reliable) classification of the undated Ga-den Tangka into 8 classes each with up to twelve subdivisions by Nicholas Rhodes in a paper for the ONS. This became the standard as a contemporary analysis of the 1000+ varieties by Scott Semans can be tied into this system.
The Standard Catalog of World Coins -19th and 20th centuries - tried to precis this carefully constructed structure into a crudely re-numbered system, which made it impossible to classify Tangkas on all but the most basic level not helped by the unfathomable text, photos and descriptions .

The graders tried to follow this but actually graded very few Tangkas (somewhat mercifully as mistakes were commonplace). But in the early teens PCGS had had enough and adopted the Rhodes system wholemeal.
Rhodes B(iv) and F (x) began appearing on their encapsulated Tangkas with the brackets helping stop Biv being spell-corrected to Big. They also revised their population report to reflect past slabs.

But most rarities are at a level below this, depending on minor differences in individual dies and Rhodes Bivb or Fxa only covered some of these.
One type was a machine made coin Dv - a single die coin very very similar to the various Div dies but machine made with a perfectly uniform edge, rather like a modern penny or cent. All other Tangkas had the clipped edges. So Rhodes D(v) became Y.D13.5 but was not really seen by the graders as few of the handful produced.

And then Wilhelm Bertsch, who has written widely on Tibetan coins, discovered a batch of single die 6 Fvi Tangkas - which he never saw again - which were also machine made and distributed them to major collectors of the time.
Fvi and Fvii are of such similarity - a single mm (11 or 12) in a central circle that even experts confuse them and Fvii is the almost most common coin in both Rhodes and Semans population report. Generally in the early days both were included in Y.F13.1. with the 12mm fetching slightly higher prices.

But then The Standard tried to re-classify their numbers - particularly the F types and messed up. True Y.F 13.4, .5 and .6 (covering Rhodes Fviii to Fxii) were clearer and Rhodes Fi to Fiii were Y.F13.1 but it was even more unclear what dies should be included in Y.F 13.2

..and Y.F13.3 was created with an
"Obs 11mm lotus circle and Rev solid lotus buds Note: machine struck"
The solid buds was an error as the only F type with those was Fii . The picture was of an Fvi/Fvii type (and the buds were hollow).

This appears to be one of the dies identified in the book by Rene van Hooff "The Tibetan Gaden Tanka -a die study"covering Tankas of the Fvi to Fxii types. He found 128 different dies observes and 148 reverses for Fvii covering the years 1913 to 1918. Fvi was not covered in detail but the 12mm Tangkas of this type, maybe from 1913 have somewhat fewer dies. 1912-18 is the range.

But not one of these pictured by Rene was machine made. He included a photo of the rare machine made Fvi but all of his other coins were hand cut. No other publication or online forum I can find has ever published detailed photos of the machine made F3, in particular it's edge. Even the Bertsch photo on which I have to rely can only show die type.

PCGS and NGC were in a quandary, not knowing which Y number to use for Fvi/Fvii. After decades of practice the Tibetans had got very very good at cutting Tangkas to look round. From the Obs or Rev most of them look perfectly round - as the photos in Rene's book show. Only by spinning the coin on it's edge can the machine struck uniformity be seen.. that feature is impossible to see in slabs....and all Tangkas edges are described as "plain"..

And Standard had put a high valuation on Y.F13.3 so PCGS slabbed 53 of them and NGC 26
Viewed onscreen they looked plausible..
Auction prices went through the roof , the most common Tangka - in a slab with the magic Y.F13..3 -had become the costliest with an NGC ms63 coin going for $717 in Heritage 2015 (up from $223 in 2014) and ms55 for $143 -despite the later coin looking distinctly hand cut.

But maybe the Tangka has finally dropped as the same auction house in July 2018 sold for only $40 plus BP for a PCGS ms55....
Barely worth the slab cost.

A large number of collectors had sorted out their roundest good condition Fvii and bought into the fantasy by sending them to the graders.

Be interesting to see what the current offering by Stacks makes.

And the other possible machine struck - even rarer than Dv or Fvii - of the Rhodes Ei type (maybe what Y.E13.2 is supposed to represent?) is also in the Stacks auction (but the coin slabbed is actually an Evi of which no collector has ever seen as a machine made Tangka).

And for non machine struck in Stack's: the PCGS Rhodes Ei -actually Eiv. The Bi a Bii, the Hi an Hii,

Or Heritage where a Biv is actually a Biii

Or ebay where several PCGS mislabels are currently available, including a suspicious looking Dv (a Div die?) - the first recognized machine struck Tangka.

and these are just those on sale today....

But now I'm back to the start - I just wish PCGS would have a higher hit rate now that they have adopted the Rhodes system and that they, together with NGC and The Standard, work out a system that does not lead to such confusion.
PCGS could lead the way by going through their population with a toothcomb and ensuring future graders do not use an incorrect prior slabbed coin as reference.